Brave New World
by jtav
Summary: "You have a chance to find her, and she has a chance to save you." A flash of green light changed the galaxy forever. Matthias Shepard has a promise to keep. Miranda has a world to rebuild. Together, they might find a happy ending.
1. Chapter 1

_Like many people, I was displeased with the ending to Mass Effect 3. This is neither more nor less than an attempt to fix them and some issues I had with Miranda. A modified version of the backstory I created for Portrait has been used, but a quick summary is provided in-story._

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><p>The boy—the Catalyst, Matt corrected himself—watched him silently with transparent eyes, as if he were waiting. Christ, it actually meant to let him make this choice. Pain fled to be replaced by a numb horror. It was one thing to choose to sacrifice the Destiny Ascension or to destroy the Collector Base. Those had been tactical calculations of risk versus reward. This was deciding the fate of all life everywhere. No one person should ever make that call.<p>

"If you do not choose, the battle will continue. All you love will perish. She will perish."

Miranda. No. He had already lost too many. Ash. Thane. Tali. Legion. He wouldn't lose her as well. She was all he had left. "I can still save her, right?"

"If you choose now."

No getting out of it then. He looked to his right. A few shots at the tubing were all it would take to destroy the Reapers once and for all. This war that had consumed him, that had pushed out his art and nearly pushed out Miranda, would at last be over. He would come back to her and honor his promise. They would build a life together. He would paint her as she deserved. Just a few shots…

And the destruction of all synthetic life. No more EDI. No more geth. Matt inhaled, and fire spread through his chest. "_Shepard-Commander, I must go to them." _To destroy the geth now, just as awareness was beginning to dawn, would be genocide. The Butcher of Torfan would be a butcher in truth. And EDI, who was falling in love for the first time and to whom Matt owed his life a thousand times over. Gone with no more effort than it took to squeeze the trigger. No, Anderson had been wrong. Destroying the Reapers was not the way.

His eyes fell on the device the Illusive Man had planned to use to control the Reapers. There was power there, if the Catalyst was right. But it was the power of a lonely god cut off from all human concern. Miranda's voice echoed in his head._ "I told myself that I was doing it for humanity, but installing that chip would have allowed me to control you the way Father wanted to control me. What a bloody hypocrite I was." _And domination wasn't the answer here either, was it? He was an ordinary man. The Reapers might rebel against him before he even started. Or he might go as mad with power as Henry Lawson.

"There is another way, you know."

"I know," Matt whispered. He had done his best to avoid looking at the green light when he arrived, but now it filled his vision. "Turn us all into some kind of hybrid."

"It will bring peace between synthetics and organics. We will become more like you, and organics will become more like us. Our strength will be wedded to your empathy. The cycle will come to an end. My purpose will be complete." The Catalyst's voice was sad. "My tools, my children, will be free. It is the only way to create harmony from chaos. Creator and created are too opposed. If left unchecked, all life everywhere would be destroyed. You saw it yourself on Rannoch."

"Damn you. Damn your cycles." He took a halting step forward, and a knifelike pain radiated up his leg, as if his own body was begging him to stop. "Haven't I done enough? I've been the galaxy's errand boy since I was eighteen. Now you want me to die, too?"

"All that you are will be absorbed and sent out." The Catalyst cocked its transparent head to one side. "What do you think she would do?"

"Don't bring Miranda into this," Matt ground out. But he knew what Miranda—Miranda who put her life on the line to save humanity a dozen times over, Miranda who had an idealism he could never hope to match—would do. She would sacrifice her own life and happiness rather than commit genocide. And that, in the end, was why Matt dragged himself to the edge of the platform and jumped.

Green light enveloped him. There was no pain. Indeed, there seemed to be no physical sensation at all. He had been reduced to memory and thought alone. And those memories were racing past like currents of electricity.

_He sketched Miranda with quick, clean lines. No wasted effort, just like the woman herself. Miranda fidgeted in her chair. This was the first time she has sat for him, his reward for particularly wide singularity field. But he found he scarcely needed her as a model. She had been burned into his mind long ago._

_The Alliance recruiter's eyes glittered with undisguised greed. "The Alliance would be willing to overlook your, ah, brush with the law in exchange for service. Ten years in prison, or ten years of service. Your choice, Mr. Shepherd."_

"_Miranda, things are never going to be easy for us, but I'll always want you in my life." For the smallest fraction of a moment, he could see the disbelief and joy on her face. He watched her with disbelief of his own. Didn't she know by now that he wasn't going anywhere?_

_Tali pivoted, graceful as a dancer, and flung herself off the cliff. Matt heard his voice scream her name as she plummeted towards the earth. The last of the quarians and one of his oldest friends was dead. He was worse than a murderer. He was traitor who had allowed genocide because he couldn't find the right words._

_Miranda stood over Henry's corpse. Her face was covered in bruises, but she had never looked so beautiful. A goddess, an avenging angel meting out the justice he could not. Sanctuary would be nothing more than a memory now, thanks to her. And she had given him Cerberus._

_The holographic Miranda's fingers hovered over his cheek. "Finish this, Matt, and find me."_

He would break that promise. The one thing he wanted was the one thing he could not have. He would be immortalized in art the way he had once sought to immortalize others. He would be called a savior, a redeemer. In a thousand years, somebody would probably start a religion with him as God. But Miranda was lost to him.

"Is she?" The Catalyst's voice echoed around him. "I said you would be absorbed. I never said you would die. You have a chance to find her, and she has a chance to save you. Let us see if you take it."

Matt blacked out before he could ask what the hell that was supposed to mean.

_Two weeks later_

Mordin bustled around the Lawson Biomedical lab as if it belonged to him. Henry Lawson would have been horrified to find a salarian in charge of his lab, but Miranda was grateful. The salarians had taken heavy casualties in the Disaster, and he was one of the few people with the medical expertise to help them piece together what had happened in the aftermath and the ability to keep up with Miranda's punishing schedule.

"Have finished examining patient. Your hypothesis correct. Found nanites similar to those of indoctrinated subjects in bloodstream. Self-repair properties likely responsible for survival of suicide attempt."

Miranda tensed. The massive casualties sustained in the battle for London, the destruction of the relays, and the as-yet-unexplained flash of green light that had given everyone eyes that glowed had driven many to suicide. Those who had chosen violent means such as turning a gun on themselves had largely been successful, but those who had poisoned themselves had simply refused to die. Their bodies had repaired the damage faster than the toxins could cause it. "So, we're all indoctrinated, then?"

That would be a perfect capstone to this tragedy. Earth's population had been cut in half in just a few months. The Charon relay had been reduced to debris, stranding the allied forces in the Sol system. No one but the asari or krogan would ever see home again. Galactic civilization as they knew it was gone. Miranda would never see Oriana again. Matt and the rest of the _Normandy _crew were presumed lost. The Reapers had quit the field for unknown reasons, but it seemed they had won after all. Organics were destined to lose their minds.

But Mordin shook his head. "Unlikely. Nervous system altered, but changes not consistent with autopsies performed on Cerberus personnel. Endocrine system normal. Evidence of possibilities for increased strength and cognitive ability, but not indoctrination. Only preliminary guess with small sample size. Will need to run study once crisis has passed." He smiled, and it was the first real smile Miranda had seen in two weeks. "Fascinating mystery."

"Indeed." If intellectual curiosity kept Mordin upbeat, then he should indulge. The science team that had worked on the Crucible had suffered over eighty percent casualties. Brilliant minds like Mordin would be invaluable to Earth's recovery, if Earth even could recover. Miranda would be invaluable. At least that was what she told herself. It made an excellent excuse not to put a bullet in her skull. And at least now she knew not to try poison.

He peered at her. In salarians the green light was little more than pinpricks against a vast blackness. "Dark circles under eyes. Skin paler than normal. Signs of fatigue in humans. Recommend sleep, or at least cessation of work for day."

_If I stop, I might have time to think._ "I've got some reports from Brynn to go over first." She left before he could protest.

Henry had been a scientist first, a businessman second, and a father a distant third. He had wanted his office close to the labs, the better to monitor progress. Miranda had often found him haranguing the nominal project lead over some point of genetics while he was supposed to be dealing with stockholders. His assistant had had to drag him away from an attempt to increase telomerase production after Miranda had broken her arm. His office had reflected his priorities. Computers were everywhere, but the furniture was spare and built for function rather than luxury. A QEC dominated the center of the room. There had been no personal effects for Miranda to clear out when she had decided to make this the base of operation for her and the surviving former Cerberus personnel.

The one concession to his position had been the spectacular view. Perth, Sydney, and Brisbane had been devastated by the Reapers, but the resort town of Coffs Harbour had largely been left alone. The sea was the clear blue of her childhood, and white sand dotted the beaches. No smoke wafted up from a thousand fires, as it had in London. One could walk the streets here without the certainty of being mugged, raped, or murdered. That was one of Miranda's few accomplishments. The remnants of her strike team had become an impromptu police force, imposing a rough order on her childhood home. An order harshly enforced, but order nonetheless.

Brynn's message awaited her.

_We've begun work on tissue samples from those who were in an intermediate husk state but not yet fully converted at the time the Reapers left the system. Prognosis for reversing the process is grim. Most are effectively dead the moment they come in contact with Dragon's Teeth. We could possibly do something with those who had been integrated, but there have been no reports of Cerberus troops in the area. Focusing on those indoctrinated, but not implanted, is our most productive course of action given our extremely limited resources._ _That makes the data you grabbed from Sanctuary much less useful, but with all the weird stuff going on, maybe that's a good thing. _

Miranda buried her face in her hands. So much for that. She had been so sure—no, she had desperately wanted to believe—that the research she had gotten from Sanctuary would save lives. After all, without her, that would have been no Sanctuary. The astonishment in Henry's voice had been audible even in recordings. The pathetic daughter he had discarded had been useful after all. Miranda's research into a means to control Matt had provided the foundation for Sanctuary's work. There would have been no Paul Grayson, no integration process, if not for Lazarus and her desire for a control chip.

It always came back to the control chip. When she was twenty years old, she had trained an unusually powerful biotic and aspiring artist named Matthias Shepard to use his power so that Cerberus could test the L3 implant. Fifteen years later, she had brought him back from the dead. But the chip and Sanctuary tainted everything she had done, just as the madness of the last year had tainted Cerberus. Any good she or they had done had turned to ash. Henry took the blame, but she was responsible. She was the one who had been too blind to see the Illusive Man or Cerberus for what they were until it was too late. She hadn't even seen how much of her father there was in her: the brilliant genius infinitely more concerned with results than people. Matt had been her lover as well as her student all those years ago. That hadn't mattered. Cerberus had needed Commander Shepard to work with them, and Miranda would deliver that by fair means or foul. Falling in love with him again, and he with her, had been a grace neither expected nor deserved.

Neither of them had ever called it love. It would have been presumption, a jinx. But Miranda had seen it in drawings and paintings, had felt it in the way he squeezed her hand before they made the final jump through the Omega-4 relay. He had wanted her, but it was more than that. He had looked at her as if he believed she really could improve humanity. He would help her build a new world and chronicle it. He had loved her not for her looks or anything Henry had given her, but for her passion. As she had loved him for his, the way he believed the entire world could be explained in color and line.

The rest of the galaxy had fawned over the soldier who saved them all or cursed the man who had left the Council to die. But he had been Miranda's brilliant, darling boy first; and it was the boy—the man beneath the armor—that she had loved. Matt, who had drunkenly said her eyes were the color of space. Matt, who had held her quietly after Niket's death. Matt, who had taught her that supporting human advancement didn't mean supporting Cerberus. He had made her world richer, broader. With him at her side, she could have both a cause and a love.

And she had lost him. "Damn you, Matt, for promising. And damn me for believing."

"You aren't...the only one who…honors her promises." The voice was garbled as if coming from underwater, with a synthesized quality like those of Cerberus troopers or David Archer when he was plugged into the Overlord device.

Miranda's head snapped up, but there was no one there, and it was a very strange thing for an intruder to say. She ran her fingers through her hair. She'd stooped to hearing voices. Fatigue and grief had chipped away at her sanity bit by bit. Mordin was right. She needed a rest.

"Not a hallucination. I'll prove it." A green wall of light about the size of a grown man appeared in the QEC. The light shifted and changed, shrinking and altering form as if it were a block of marble being shaped by an invisible sculptor. Miranda watched in shock and fascination as it resolved itself into the rough form of a man. Then eyes, tinged with the unnatural green light but still undeniably blue, appeared. A crooked nose, a thin mouth. Last of all was dark auburn hair, this sort she had loved stroking when she had passed. It couldn't be. It wasn't. Even Lazarus couldn't make this miracle happen.

"Hello," Matt said. "Did it work? Can you hear me?"

Miranda stared at him open-mouthed. This couldn't be happening. She had lost everything, so her mind finally broken and given her back one thing. Matt was nothing more than a beautiful, agonizing fever dream.

"I'm real, Miranda." His voice cracked as he stared at his glowing hands as if he'd never seen them before. "I've come back. The Catalyst said that…I never believed…Oh, God."

"No," Miranda rasped, her throat raw with a burning pain. "You're just an illusion." An illusion she was talking to. Damn it.

"Shit, I should've known this would happen. And me without a body to prove I'm real." The specter's brow furrowed the same way Matt's did when he was planning a painting or deciding the most effective way to flank the enemy. I really, really hope this works. Could an illusion do this?"

The terminal Miranda had been reading winked off, and an alarm sounded somewhere in the distance. Matt smirked. "Hope no one tries to break in the next 10.32 seconds. Your security systems are going absolutely nuts."

"This is insane," Miranda managed. "I'm insane."

The comm link sprang to life before Matt could say anything. "Ms. Lawson. We have a situation. The security systems went off-line for a bit. We're not exactly sure what's going on."

Miranda stared at Matt and he at her. This couldn't be real. Fate had never been kind to her. Miranda always lost what she loved, and it never came back. And yet...hope was the cruelest of all masters. "For just a little over ten seconds."

"How did you know?"

Miranda's operative training kicked in by instinct, and her voice was cool and professional. "Never mind. The situation is under control." She shut the comm link off with shaking hands.

Matt was here. Somehow the dead had returned to life once more. The world had ended, but Fate had seen fit to give her this one moment of grace. The wall of numb grief sloughed off like a scab, exposing the rawness within. Grief and elation intertwined so tightly that Miranda could no longer tell which was which. Hot tears poured down her face, for what she had lost and what she had gotten back. Miranda had neither the strength nor the will to stop them.

Matt's voice was soft and warm. "Don't cry. Please. I've come back."

"How?" Miranda whispered. Perhaps it was foolish to question, but Miranda was a scientist. All things were explainable with time. Even miracles.

Matt told her. His voice was low and rhythmic, the way it was when he tried and failed for the thousandth time to explain to her what he saw in a Caravaggio or Degas. It was an incredible story. AIs that wore the form of a child. Synthetics becoming like organics. The Reapers being set free. All life changing on a molecular level. "I'm not really sure how I came back. I guess you could say that I put myself back together. Bits of data pieced together to make a person. No body, but I can control tech. I'm not sure what you would call me."

Miranda wiped her eyes. Matt was watching her with a mixture of worry and affection. He was a human hologram, if what he said was true. A digital ghost. Half of a miracle then, bringing back the mind but not the body. "I don't know what you are, either. I don't know what any of us are. But I'll find out. And I won't leave you like this."

"Touching you again…" His smile was a brittle, frantically hopeful thing that looked as if it might break into pieces at any moment. "An ambitious undertaking, Ms. Lawson.

"I was born for ambition, Commander." Their gazes locked, and the air was thick with something that had been absent for the last two weeks. "I'll set you free. I promise."


	2. Chapter 2

_I had intended to keep this mostly canon-compliant, but I couldn't resist adding a bit more sweet to the bittersweet ending._

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><p>He was half in the world and half out of it. Matt could travel the extranet like a river and scale security measures as if they were garden walls. Nothing, not the darkest military secret nor the most trivial gossip, was hidden from him. He wasn't a ghost, a machine, or a man, but something of all three. And he was watching Miranda sleep.<p>

Matt could count on one hand the number of times he'd gotten to do that when he was made of flesh and blood. They hadn't a relationship as much as a collection of stolen moments. He'd been her student and then her commanding officer. And then she had been on the run from Cerberus. He had always had to leap from her bed before anyone found them together. But now? Whatever Matt had become when he threw himself into that wall of green light, he was a man permitted to watch the woman he loved sleep. And for that, he was grateful.

The war had left its mark upon her. The thick, glossy hair Matt had loved to run his fingers through was short and ragged. Her cheeks were hollow. She was thin, not in the lean, athletic way of a woman who kept herself in shape, but in the way the teeming mass of refugees had been thin. Worst of all was the pallor. The first time Matt had seen Miranda, her skin had reminded him of carved marble. It was still pale, but sickly now in a way he hadn't seen in over fifteen years. And for all that, she was beautiful. If he looked he could see other marks, signs of the transformation he had caused. A subtle light twisted and pulsed like veins beneath her skin. Such a strange, alien beauty he'd brought into the world.

She stirred and blinked against the light peaking over the horizon. The green glow had faded from her eyes, dimmed to tiny flecks in the iris. "Matt?" Disbelief flitted across her face, but then she smiled. It wasn't the cocky smirk he knew so well, but the open, unguarded grin she reserved for Oriana and the chosen few she allowed into her charmed circle. "So, I'm not hallucinating."

He smiled at her. "No."

She tossed back the covers. Matt drank in the sight of her. All the little details he'd forgotten: the scar on her chest, legacy of a surgery that had given her biotics and nearly killed her. The mole on her shoulder. Even her breasts had dimmed in his memory. Lust spiraled through him like electricity. One night in a rented apartment didn't make up for nine months of only having his right hand and imagination for company. But Miranda was here. He could gorge himself on her.

Her eyes glittered. "Enjoying the view?"

"You have no idea." Her skin drew him forward like a magnet. Miranda had been designed to drive men mad with lust. She certainly drove Matt crazy. He reached for her…

…and his hand went right through her shoulder.

Matt looked down at his hand. They were solid-looking enough at first glance, but the sunlight revealed them as the holograms they were. Yes, Miranda drove him crazy. Crazy enough to forget what he was. He had come back, but only partly. He was just a mind that could give itself the illusion of a human form thanks to technical wizardry he didn't even understand. He couldn't lose himself in Miranda. Couldn't run his fingers through her hair or graze her nipples with his teeth the way she liked. He couldn't… "I—I'm sorry."

There was no pity in Miranda's gaze, and that Matt would be forever grateful for that. "I promised you yesterday that I wouldn't let you stay like this. I'll bring you back." But her movements seemed checked and restrained as she got out of bed and began dressing, as if she were managing a heavy load.

"But first I need to…" Her stomach growled.

"But first you need to eat," he offered with forced cheer. "I'll help. That tech I can control? Pretty sure it includes stoves."

"Are you sure you want me eating in front of you?"

Shit. Eating was another thing he wasn't doing for the foreseeable future. No more quiche or medium-rare steaks. But Miranda had looked so thin since leaving Cerberus. Being on the run didn't leave time for three square meals a day. And, if he knew her at all, Miranda hadn't stopped working since the destruction of the relays. Matt might be denied the pleasure of an omelet, but he could help Miranda get her life and body back to normal. "Stuff yourself. That's an order, Ms. Lawson."

Her lips twitched. "I don't take orders from you, Commander. Remember? We both resigned."

Matt followed her, careful to match his illusory stride with hers. Walking, he discovered, was a chore. His body kept wanting to rush on ahead, straight into the stove or toaster. He kept walking. _Not a ghost. Human. Matt. Humans walk._ The kitchen was large and spotlessly white. He could imagine Henry ordering a dinner for dozens prepared here. Cooking breakfast for one seemed like showing off. "I'm surprised this place is still standing."

"The town was too small for the Reapers to bother with it. Good enough base of operations for now. And you've seen what I've done to the old offices. Say what you will about Henry. He spared no expense stocking the labs. Brynn's ecstatic." She brushed an errant hair from her face. "Chasing our tails trying to figure out what's going on while reducing misery as much as we can. Not nearly as much as we'd like, I'm afraid. But you? You've given me answers. And a thousand more questions. And something to work for."

Her face transformed as she spoke. Fatigue and worry were swept away by passion. Energy crackled in her eyes like lightning. Matt wished he had breath to hold. This was the Miranda he loved best of all, brimming with ideas and enthusiasm. There were times he had thought that part of her was dead, buried under her terror for Oriana and hatred of her father, but here she was again, returned as surely as he himself had been. "What have you done to us? To yourself? A fusion of organic and synthetic. We already have confirmation of poison resistance similar to what I gave you with Lazarus, but there's no telling what else has changed.

"And you, so insistent on walking beside me even though there's no reason you couldn't just appear somewhere like you did in the QEC. If what you said is correct, you were reconstructed as data. Scarcely different from an AI with its blue box. And AIs have been nothing if not efficient. And yet, you choose the harder path." She cocked her head to one side. "Trying to hold on to your humanity." Her eyes widened. "_That's_ what you've created. Even at their best, the geth sought isolation. EDI was a singular anomaly, and even she knew humans and organics were separate kinds. Dr. Eva shared nothing but the late Eva Corré's name. But you're Matt. You aren't an AI, not as we understand them. You're a human mind in digital form. If the human mind can be digitized so effectively, then we can do with it what we can do with other digital information: copies, backups, transferals to other platforms. And if I can transfer your mind into a body, this Lazarus could mean so much more than the resurrection of one man."

"You think that's possible. It seems—" Dread settled over him as he processed what she'd said. "You said that EDI _was_ an anomaly. What happened?"

The fire in her faded as Miranda hugged her arms to her chest. "The _Normandy_ disappeared sometime during the battle. The ground team is fine, but Joker and the rest of the crew are missing and presumed lost. EDI relinquished control of her body. It's no more alive than your average toaster."

"Oh, God." The _Normandy_,gone. He'd never been quite as close to any of his crew as he had Kaidan, Thane, or Miranda; but they had been his friends. Traynor had been his intellectual sparring partner, someone to bounce ideas off of in Miranda's absence. Chakwas and Joker were old friends he had loved as much for their familiarity as for themselves. And EDI...so curious about her existence and wanting to be responsible with her newfound freedom. Matt had done his best to help her, warning her away from Joker the same way he'd warn any woman whose heart he didn't want to see broken. All of them. Snuffed out like a candle flame. "Fuck the Catalyst. And fuck his damn Reapers."

Miranda stayed silent. If he had had a body, she might have wrapped her arms around him in a wordless hug. As it was, her hand hovered just over his shoulder. "The Crucible wrecked the relays. The _Normandy's _gone. I'm a ghost who can't even touch his girlfriend. Sure as hell doesn't feel like victory." He bowed his head. "You really think there's hope?"

"For you or Earth?

"Either."

"Oh, Matt," she whispered. "We all knew there would be losses. I thought that call in London would be the last I heard of you. I was half-convinced the Crucible would burn Earth to a cinder while the Reapers laughed in our faces. It'll take decades to rebuild, but we're rebuilding. And that's something no other cycle can claim. Oriana will never be pulped like the colonists." Her free hand traced the outline of his cheek. "You came back when I'd given you up for dead. I'm expanding my definition of possible."

Oriana. He'd been an idiot, wallowing in self-pity. Miranda had lost someone too. He turned to face her. "I am so, so sorry. If I'd known Ori was going to be stranded on Eden Prime—"

"You'd have done exactly what you did. Eden Prime has a strong agricultural economy, and the resistence movement ensures security. Ori can be happy there. As for me…" Her voice caught and she gave Matt the same sad smile she had when she'd talked about breaking in to see him. "We knew each other for a year. More than I de—than I could have hoped. This is just returning to the status quo." She turned away from him, and Matt wondered if she was wiping tears.

Her shoulders straightened and she turned back to him, smile in place once more. "For now, breakfast. Eggs benedict, I think. And then, let Liara, Mordin and the others know you're alive. Can't keep you to myself forever."

* * *

><p>Matt zipped through the Lawson Biomedical security system. The cameras were his eyes and the microphones were his ears. At first glance, the lab looked like an unusually large Cerberus cell. He recognized most of the staff from Gellix. Here and there, though, were an asari or salarian. That never would have happened under the Illusive Man. They were spread out before him like a painting. He saw a lone scientist inject something into a syringe while a group on another floor examined a cybernetic arm. And he heard them as they whispered together. Even with Miranda's insistence that he not show himself to the staff before Kaidan and the others could see him for themselves, there were rumors that Commander Shepard had returned from the dead a second time.<p>

He was the last to arrive in Miranda's office. Miranda sat behind her father's desk, leaning forward in her chair expectantly. Kaidan looked as if he had aged ten years in the last two weeks. Silver streaked his hair, and there were wrinkles around his eyes. Someone had found him a dress uniform to wear, and he fiddled with the cuffs absently. Liara paced the length of the office, nibbling her lip as she did so.

"So Shepard's some kind of holographic ghost or something?" Kaidan asked. "It seems a little crazy, almost too good to be true. He just appeared to you?"

"There are legends across almost all cultures of the dead returning to those they love as some kind of non-corporal energy being," Liara said. "Most myths have some basis in fact. Misremembered encounters with other species or their technology. Is it so far-fetched that something similar happened here?"

Not so far-fetched. Matt concentrated on the QEC. Yesterday had been a Hail Mary, an impulsive, desperate gamble to return to the woman he loved. Today was different. He had time to notice the transformation. He went from looking at the room as if were a painting to looking at it as it were a film. He was no longer watching a dozen different things, but only one. He limited himself in space and time, becoming human once more.

But of course, all they saw was the green light. Liara and Kaidan gaped at him, and even Miranda's eyes widened a bit. "Hi, guys," he said.

There were no tears this time. Liara beamed in a way he hadn't seen since she learned that her rescuer had been touched by an actual, working Prothean beacon. Kaidan just stared for a long moment. And then they were peppering Matt with questions and thanking gods and goddesses he hadn't even known they believed in. Matt answers the questions as best he could. As he watched their smiling, astonished faces, it occurred to Matt that he had been wrong. Miranda was not all he had. There were others who loved him, and they were here in this room.

He was neither ghost, nor man, nor machine. He was his own kind, but he was not alone.


	3. Chapter 3

_Sorry about that. But FFN seems better now. I've_ _corrected a math error and changed Oriana's location to Eden Prime._

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><p>The skeleton was as black as charred flesh. Wires poked out of the chest and eye sockets. The top part of the skull was completely missing. Matt looked down at it with poorly-concealed disgust. "I'm going to be stuck in that?"<p>

"It's only the frame. The quantum computer isn't even in yet."

Matt's lips thinned. Miranda shot him a sideways glance. She found herself looking at him often these days, and not out of anything as pedestrian as desire. He was a marvel. The muscles of his jaw appeared to tense, his chest appear to rise and fall at regular intervals, all without the muscles that would work by instinct in an organic body. What sort of computer had the power to regulate and replicate the thousands of involuntary functions of the human body? It made Miranda's head spin just thinking about it.

"I was just…I was hoping for something a bit more, er, human."

She smiled at him, placating. "You looked much worse the first time around. Wilson vomited, and I didn't sleep soundly for a week. And you came out all right. Synthetic skin is virtually indistinguishable from the genuine article except under a microscope. No one was able to tell Eva was a synthetic until after the shuttle crash. You'll be outwardly indistinguishable from what you were before. And you said yourself that we're all hybrids now."

But Matt kept staring at the metal skeleton, his gaze managing somehow to be both distant and pained. Miranda's heart sank. After the death of his family, Matt had fought a long, grueling war of attrition with depression that had ended in stalemate. Time and therapy had seen him through the worst of it, but sometimes the ghosts still returned to haunt him. And Miranda was never quite a match for ghosts. No matter how many books she read or psychologists she consulted, her talents tended more towards manipulating a mark than helping a lover.

"EDI," he said softly. "I told her she was a person. And she was. Almost like having another little sister. But she wasn't human. She was a brand-new species. The only one of her kind. And I'll be the only one of mine, as different from you as an asari is from a salarian." He looked at her as if she was supposed to have the answer. "How am I supposed to deal with that?"

And perhaps she did have the answer. She was, after all, a construct in her own way, designed according to a template set down by another human being. Luddites and religious fundamentalists had called her an abomination, a perversion of the natural order of reproduction. Miranda Lawson looked human, felt human, but she wasn't and never would be anything other than a latter-day Frankenstein's monster. Henry had been more than happy to use their ignorance to convince her that she would never find a place in the world except as his legacy and tool. It had taken her years to break free of that particular mental prison. "You said EDI was a person. Well, so are you. You have friends. You have me. You have an entire galaxy of people who worship the ground you walk on. If you can't identify with your species, identify with the community you chose for yourself."

"And so I finally get the real reason you joined Cerberus." He smiled weakly. "I just wanted us to be the same species."

"Henry wanted a master race lording above all others. I chose to help them instead." Her fingers traced the outline of his cheek. "Besides, I seem to recall someone once telling me that compassion and drive were the true marks of humanity."

His smile grew a little brighter. It was a start. "And sexual compatibility. Don't forget that."

Miranda chuckled. Men. "That will not be a problem, I assure you. Some things might take a little getting used to, but we'll work it out. You've always been an exceptionally quick learner when properly motivated." And then she would exit this desert of celibacy. He wanted her? Miranda was more than happy to oblige. Anonymous sex geared toward relief or procreation was all very well, but that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted a lover, someone who wanted to please her and be pleased by her. She wanted to run her hands over a body she knew better than she knew her own. She wanted to display every erotic trick she'd learned and know that there was no need to hold back. And then he would show a few of his own. She wanted Matt: alive, whole, and in her bed.

"I'm motivated." A casual observer would have called his tone teasing, but Miranda knew a brave face when she saw one. It was his turn to stroke her cheek. The hologram caused no sensation at all, not even the cold that was supposed to accompany being touched by a ghost. "This is all the motivation I need."

Miranda didn't say anything. They stood like that for a long time. Miranda fought the urge to turn her face and kiss his palm. It would only remind them both of all the intimacies great and small that were currently denied them.

And the truth was that this resurrection would be harder than it seemed. EDI's body had been badly damaged in the battle for London. From the small shreds of information Matt had been able to recover from Cronos Station, the EVA project had moved much more quickly than Lazarus, but had been no less complicated. The human mind was a complex thing, and creating an AI that was not merely sentient but could pass the Turing Test with flying colors was no small matter. EVA had been designed to mimic humans, even be capable of seduction and manipulation as necessary. Matt had his personality already, but the hardware that had given EVA hers would need to be painstakingly re-created. Matt couldn't just control the body like a marionette. He would have to inhabit it the way he had inhabited the original.

EVA had been to the field of artificial intelligence what Lazarus was to biology. And it would have to be re-created without notes or any of the expertise that had made it possible. Miranda was brilliant, but she knew she had stood on the shoulders of giants with Lazarus. And this time all the giants were dead.

Then there was the problem of biotics. Biotics had been as much a part of Matt as his painting. He had rivaled—did rival, Miranda corrected herself—Jack in power, without having been subjected to the horrors of Teltin. It was why the Alliance had been interested in him in the first place. But no synthetic, no matter how advanced, had ever been able to manipulate mass effect fields. Even if this project was a success, it was possible that it wouldn't quite be Matt who came back. Unless Miranda was very clever. Leng hadn't been a true biotic either, but the Phantom implants had given him impressive telekinetic abilities. Perhaps Miranda could create a similar simulation suitable for a synthetic body. Perhaps.

"You okay? Thought I'd lost you there for a second."

"I'm fine." Matt had enough to worry about without her confiding failures that hadn't even happened yet. He needed to be shaken from his melancholy, not driven further into it. "I got you a gift. I was going to wait until after we were finished up for the day, but I think you deserve it now. Check my personal computer for software installed in the last six hours."

Matt stepped back. The green light in his eyes faded the way it always did when he was accessing hardware, and his holographic body pulsed and wavered. He was gone, lost in a world of data streams, and considering the gift Miranda had given him, he might not be back for the rest of the day.

But the light came back on in his eyes. He grinned like a teenager getting his first car. "PaintWorks Pro 2186! Wow. I mean, it's not exactly what I'm used to but—"

"—but you can work again." His resurrection might be uncertain, but she could still make him happy. "I'll even sit for you in the evenings if you like."

"I'd like that very much." His voice cracked. "Got to start making up for all the pieces I lost. Stupid sketchbook, getting destroyed by a Reaper."

And then he was off, discussing vector and raster graphics, and how he could get the shading effects he wanted. Miranda listened, drinking in the tone more than the words. Miranda never understood what he saw when he looked at a canvas or the process he used to transform it into art. It was alchemy; only instead of turning lead into gold, he turned paint or charcoal into subjects with a life all their own. But the quiet intensity, the possessive, knowing way his gaze raked over a subject, that she understood. The desire to record, to transform, to improve was something they had shared for as long as she had known him.

"I'd like to paint you in your office. The sun flooding in behind you, bringing out the highlights in your hair. Humanity's savior as she plans to make all our lives better."

Miranda raised an eyebrow. "Last I checked, I wasn't one who killed the Illusive Man or threw myself into a glowing beam."

Matt bristled. "It sounds a lot more impressive than it was. I'm really good at blowing stuff up, but that isn't what the galaxy needs right now. We need scientists, politicians, people who will make sure I'm not the only one who can do this neat stuff. We need to get the infrastructure working again beyond Coffs Harbour. That's not my fight; logistics makes my head hurt, and I only speak enough biologist to understand you. But you? You understand this stuff. And you have the vision and drive to make it happen. I've had my hour. Now it's your time. Yours and Mordin's and Brynn's. The new saviors of the galaxy.

A lump formed in Miranda's throat. She would never understand precisely how she had gotten so lucky. Matt looked at her and saw more than a beautiful woman to ogle. He saw her vision for humanity, her desire to push the limits of the possible. He didn't demand he hide her gifts to satisfy his ego. No, he celebrated them. And he had come back for her. It its own way, it was as much a miracle as the development of sapient life: a thousand factors coming together to create something wonderful.

"And personally, I'm looking forward to retirement once I get my body back. Painting again. Oils. A big canvas. Not just sketches I do whenever I find the time between bouts of blowing some bastard's head off. Far as I'm concerned, Commander Shepard did die on the Citadel. Long live M—"

An alarm sounded. Miranda jumped back. Apprehension simmered beneath her skin. "Was that you?"

Matt shook his head furiously, and Miranda switched on her comm. "What the hell is going on?"

"Code Orange. This krogan broke into one of the offices and started screaming his head off, demanding to know where we were hiding Professor Solus. No gun, but he headbutted Webber. Might have fractured his skull."

Miranda swore under her breath. Mordin's survival and employment at Lawson Biomedical had been kept a secret precisely to avoid a situation like this. Even an unarmed krogan could cause damage. And if he found Mordin… "I'll be right there."

"I'll hack a couple of the security mechs, make them shoot straight if we need it." Matt vanished.

It wasn't just any krogan raging. Wreav stood over the broken body of one of the security guards, who twitched feebly on the ground. The Event had made him even more fearsome, if such a thing were possible. His red eyes had turned a brilliant green, and silver tendrils snaked over his skin where his veins used to be.

"Where is that pyjak? I'll rip his head clean off!"

Miranda took a deep breath. Tests showed that effective strength had quadrupled across all species in the last two weeks. Which meant Wreav could now break every bone in her body with a quarter of the effort. Great. But it didn't matter. He was stupid and brutish, the best argument for the genophage she had ever seen, and she would not let him hurt her people. "What do you want, Wreav?"

He rounded on her. "I want a lot of things. But right now, I want Solus' head on a platter. He sabotaged the cure. He doomed my people to extinction!"

"Mordin did no such thing." Perfectly true. "The cure was dispensed, as agreed. Not that any of us will ever know the results. Now, leave the premises before I call the rest of my staff to escort you out. They won't be gentle."

"Hiding behind a bunch of goons, just like your boss." His eyes gleamed like freshly-polished emeralds. "Figures you'd protect the salarian. Cerberus did everything they could to screw with the krogan. And your blood still bleeds black and gold, doesn't it?"

"Leave. Now."

He took a step forward. "The salarian is hiding behind you like you hide behind your dead boyfriend. What's Solus doing for you? Figuring out new ways to kill us all? Maybe I'll make you tell me. You act tough, but I know how to make a human scream."

And then he charged. Miranda had just enough time to summon a barrier before he slammed into her. The force of it knocked her several steps backwards, and only sheer willpower kept her from tumbling to the ground. Her teeth rattled. Think. She had to think. Wreav was bigger, stronger, and faster. But he didn't have biotics. The first thing she had to do was create distance between them. She sent all the power she could muster at Wreav. He staggered backwards. Not nearly as much as he should have. But it had bought her a few seconds.

"Code Omega. Room 404." There. That would bring the entire security staff here. All she had to do was survive less than two minutes.

It only took ten seconds. Wreav bent his head, preparing to charge again. Typical krogan, trying the same brute force approach until it worked. Miranda tensed, preparing to sidestep at just the right moment. Trip the bastard, neutralizing his physical advantages. And then let her team do the rest. Only a fool fought with honor.

But then Wreav fell to his knees. He choked and spluttered as he clawed at some invisible assailant. The green light in his eyes shone more brightly now, brighter than Miranda had never seen it. The tendrils danced and shimmered across his body. Miranda had suffocated people before, but it had never been beautiful.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway as the first of the security team arrived. These were not mere guards. They were the men and women who she had sent to help take down Cronos Station. They clutched assault rifles and their body armor was battered and scarred. Wreav didn't seem to notice them. He was too busy convulsing. Miranda held up a hand.

"Die, you miserable son of a bitch," someone whispered.

And die he did. Wreav stilled abruptly, his limbs frozen at odd angles. Miranda stared at him. "What the hell was that?" Krogan, with their redundant vital organs, didn't have heart attacks. They didn't asphyxiate for no reason. The krogan clan chief had died, and what was left of the Alliance would have questions. Questions Miranda couldn't even answer for herself.

_I think I know. Send the guards out. _Matt's voice was panicked—and coming from inside her own head.

_What?_

_Please, Miranda._

"Call for medical. And a cleanup crew. I want us to be in control of the information flow here, not the krogan or the Alliance. Notify all teams that Code Omega has ended." Somehow Miranda managed not to stammer.

Matt materialized as soon as they were gone. If he had been flesh and blood, Miranda would have said his face was ashen. His voice was distant, tinged with amazement. "I panicked when I saw him come after you. And those mechs were too far away to do any good. So I jumped into him instead. The nanites. I killed him before he could kill you. People are tech now. I can control them now."

He looked down at his shoes. "That voice in your head? That was me. I wanted to send you a message without the rest of them hearing, and so I put one in your head. Just by thinking about it."

Miranda's mind stopped. What he was saying… he couldn't… "You're saying you can control us like the Illusive Man controlled Anderson?"

"More than that. I touched your mind for a moment. And when I did…" He looked up at her, his face a mixture of guilt, hope, and wonder. "…and when I did, I could feel what you felt. The air conditioner. The sweat clinging to you. Everything.

"Miranda, for a second, I was alive again."


	4. Chapter 4

Miranda stepped back. "Alive again?" Her mind fractured and reassembled as she struggled to make sense of it. Matthad been in her mind. He had entered her the way he entered the computers at the lab or his copy of PaintWorks. He had taken her senses and made them his own. She looked over at Wreav's crumpled form. The Illusive Man had always dreamed of control, whether of rachni or Reapers, but he had never managed anything like this. It was as far beyond Henry's work at Sanctuary as a flashlight was beyond a candle. "You can… you can kill anyone with just a thought. Read minds."

But Matt didn't seem to hear her. "Every time you took a breath, it was like my own lungs were filling up. Not just the way I make this hologram pretend to breathe. The real thing."

"Matt, focus! You just killed someone with your mind."

He sobered at that, but his gaze was cold. "I'm not sorry the bastard's gone. If I hadn't needed him, I would have left him to rot on Tuchanka. He was going to hurt you. I couldn't let that happen. And I killed lots of people with my mind when I had biotics. This really isn't that different, is it?"

"Yes, it's different. There are limits to biotics, countermeasures that can be put in place to neutralize them when necessary. Including other biotics. I still don't know what your limits are. You felt me breathe. You put a thought in my head. If Henry ever had that kind of power, I never would have gotten free."

His eyes narrowed. "I'm not Henry. I'd never hurt you. I—" he swallowed. "I care about you too much. Yeah, I was in your head. But I wouldn't do mind control or anything."

Miranda frowned. How to make him see? "Do you remember what you said to me when I told you about the chip?"

Matt gave her a slight, embarrassed frown of his own. "I, er, told you that I would have thrown you out the nearest airlock if it had been anyone else. Think there might have been a few comparisons to batarians in there."

"More than a few. I suppose I could have done dozens of terrible things. Made you my slave. I could have made you act exactly as if you were still in love with me. And inside your own head, you would have been screaming. But none of that even crossed my mind. All I wanted was a way to keep you under control in case you woke up as some kind of raging beast. But all you could see is what I could do." She sighed. "You were right. I don't really want to think about facing the temptation. I'd have lost my temper at one of those stupidly risky decisions you made, and maybe I'd have slipped. Controlled you, not because you were a danger, but because I disagreed."

"And now…now I can do the same. To anyone." There was no hope or wonder his eyes now. "You're afraid of me," he said softly. "But you do have power. You can walk out the door. You can feel the wind in your hair. Miranda, you can, you can touch people. And I can't touch you. All I am is a miserable ghost living off a memory of a memory of what it was like to hold you. And every day that memory gets a little bit fainter." He turned away, his shoulders hunched.

"Not a ghost, a god." Memories popped up from the boxes that she had placed them in. "The only reason we ever met was because I hated being helpless. Not being able to get out of bed on my worst days. Having to plan my day down to the last detail because I couldn't afford to overtax myself. I thought the L3 would be the cure, that I would be master of my own fate and not just a slave to the pain. But it turns out you're the master."

"I've seen you helpless, Miranda. And I helped you when you needed it. Nothing's changed." He made an odd sound, a low, metallic groan. "And besides, lots of gods fell in love with humans."

"And that usually didn't turn out too well for the human." She gave a short, bitter laugh. "I can manage being a synthetic-organic hybrid, but I draw the line at being turned into a tree."

"It worked out okay for Cupid and Psyche."

"Doesn't count. She got turned into a goddess herself, remember?"

Matt rounded on her suddenly, his eyes filled with the same manic energy as when he conceived of a particularly ambitious painting. "Then what if I made you a goddess?" Miranda gaped and he continued. "I put a thought in your head. What if I put more than a thought? People are tech. I'm just data streams, a digital avatar. I could show you how I controlled things. And you've always been better at the tech stuff than me. You could control me just like I can control PaintWorks, I think."

Miranda slumped into the nearest chair. "Is that even possible?" There was a part of her that had never stopped being the Illusive Man's second-in-command, and that part was analyzing furiously. Matt could override both machines and men with a thought. For now, that ability was unique to him. But sooner or later, some STG operative or asari scientist would find a way to make a virus to mimic the effect. And Wreav had proven this strange, new world would not always be a peaceful one. It was vital humanity develop the ability to defend itself before the aliens did. And Matt was the only one who could give her the key to do that.

"Maybe. I think so."

She knew what the Illusive Man or Henry would have done. Find a way to imprison Matt, and study him at their leisure. Brutally efficient, with no risk to themselves. But she was not the Illusive Man, any more than the scientists she led were the Cerberus of Sanctuary. Matt could feel the wind in his hair again. And all she had to do was give up the privacy of her own mind. The one thing even Henry had never been able to take from her.

_I could feel what you felt. The air conditioner. The sweat clinging to you. Everything. _Damn it. "Do it."

Matt's eyes widened, but for a moment there was such sheer hope in his eyes that a lump formed in Miranda's throat. "Are you sure?"

"Now. Before I lose my nerve."

Matt winked out of existence. And then—

There was color and light everywhere. Everything seemed sharper and clearer than before. The fiber-optic cables in the walls seemed to pulse and writhe like snakes. A computer terminal in the wall glowed with strange green light. Miranda focused on it. Streams of data flew past her eyes. It should have been too fast for her to read, but she saw it all: project reports, personal e-mails, silly pictures of cats. And she could erase them with a thought or do anything she liked.

And Matt was there, like a whisper in the back of her mind. Him she didn't see. But she could feel him: the exultation, the relief, the sheer joy of inhabiting the physical world once more. _Mine, _she thought. _You're mine. And the world is ours._

"Easy now," Matt whispered. "Don't burn yourself out."

Miranda blinked, and the world was back to normal. "Incredible. I know I told you everything would change, but this is beyond anything I could've imagined.

"'O brave new world, that has such people in it?"

Miranda smiled and shook her head despite herself. "How long have you been waiting to use that one?"

She could almost see him clasping his hands innocently behind his back. "Only since we met, give or take a few days."

"Bastard." But Shakespeare was appropriate. This was a strange, beautiful, and terrible world she had leaped into. She might go mad with power or simply mad. Or this might be the true dawn of humanity's golden age. No way to be sure until it happened. "Let's see what this brave new world has to offer."


	5. Closure

_No, you aren't seeing double. After some thought, I've decided this story works better as a one shot, and I've added a new scene to the end to provide closure. I'm keeping the old chapters up for the benefit of those who liked them, but I regard this as the final version of the story._

* * *

><p>The boy—the Catalyst, Matt corrected himself—watched him silently with transparent eyes, as if he were waiting. Christ, it actually meant to let him make this choice. Pain fled to be replaced by a numb horror. It was one thing to choose to sacrifice the Destiny Ascension or to destroy the Collector Base. Those had been tactical calculations of risk versus reward. This was deciding the fate of all life everywhere. No one person should ever make that call.<p>

"If you do not choose, the battle will continue. All you love will perish. She will perish."

Miranda. No. He had already lost too many. Ash. Thane. Tali. Legion. He wouldn't lose her as well. She was all he had left. "I can still save her, right?"

"If you choose now."

No getting out of it then. He looked to his right. A few shots at the tubing were all it would take to destroy the Reapers once and for all. This war that had consumed him, that had pushed out his art and nearly pushed out Miranda, would at last be over. He would come back to her and honor his promise. They would build a life together. He would paint her as she deserved. Just a few shots…

And the destruction of all synthetic life. No more EDI. No more geth. Matt inhaled, and fire spread through his chest. "Shepard-Commander, I must go to them." To destroy the geth now, just as awareness was beginning to dawn, would be genocide. The Butcher of Torfan would be a butcher in truth. And EDI, who was falling in love for the first time and to whom Matt owed his life a thousand times over. Gone with no more effort than it took to squeeze the trigger. No, Anderson had been wrong. Destroying the Reapers was not the way.

His eyes fell on the device the Illusive Man had planned to use to control the Reapers. There was power there, if the Catalyst was right. But it was the power of a lonely god cut off from all human concern. Miranda's voice echoed in his head. _"I told myself that I was doing it for humanity, but installing that chip would have allowed me to control you the way Father wanted to control me. What a bloody hypocrite I was." _And domination wasn't the answer here either, was it? He was an ordinary man. The Reapers might rebel against him before he even started. Or he might go as mad with power as Henry Lawson.

"There is another way, you know."

"I know," Matt whispered. He had done his best to avoid looking at the green light when he arrived, but now it filled his vision. "Turn us all into some kind of hybrid."

"It will bring peace between synthetics and organics. We will become more like you, and organics will become more like us. Our strength will be wedded to your empathy. The cycle will come to an end. My purpose will be complete." The Catalyst's voice was sad. "My tools, my children, will be free. It is the only way to create harmony from chaos. Creator and created are too opposed. If left unchecked, all life everywhere would be destroyed. You saw it yourself on Rannoch."

"Damn you. Damn your cycles." He took a halting step forward, and a knifelike pain radiated up his leg, as if his own body was begging him to stop. "Haven't I done enough? I've been the galaxy's errand boy since I was eighteen. Now you want me to die, too?"

"All that you are will be absorbed and sent out." The Catalyst cocked its transparent head to one side. "What do you think she would do?"

"Don't bring Miranda into this," Matt ground out. But he knew what Miranda—Miranda who put her life on the line to save humanity a dozen times over, Miranda who had an idealism he could never hope to match—would do. She would sacrifice her own life and happiness rather than commit genocide. And that, in the end, was why Matt dragged himself to the edge of the platform and jumped.

Green light enveloped him. There was no pain. Indeed, there seemed to be no physical sensation at all. He had been reduced to memory and thought alone. And those memories were racing past like currents of electricity.

_He sketched Miranda with quick, clean lines. No wasted effort, just like the woman herself. Miranda fidgeted in her chair. This was the first time she has sat for him, his reward for particularly wide singularity field. But he found he scarcely needed her as a model. She had been burned into his mind long ago._

_The Alliance recruiter's eyes glittered with undisguised greed. "The Alliance would be willing to overlook your, ah, brush with the law in exchange for service. Ten years in prison, or ten years of service. Your choice, Mr. Shepherd."_

_"Miranda, things are never going to be easy for us, but I'll always want you in my life." For the smallest fraction of a moment, he could see the disbelief and joy on her face. He watched her with disbelief of his own. Didn't she know by now that he wasn't going anywhere?_

_Tali pivoted, graceful as a dancer, and flung herself off the cliff. Matt heard his voice scream her name as she plummeted towards the earth. The last of the quarians and one of his oldest friends was dead. He was worse than a murderer. He was traitor who had allowed genocide because he couldn't find the right words._

_Miranda stood over Henry's corpse. Her face was covered in bruises, but she had never looked so beautiful. A goddess, an avenging angel meting out the justice he could not. Sanctuary would be nothing more than a memory now, thanks to her. And she had given him Cerberus._

_The holographic Miranda's fingers hovered over his cheek. "Finish this, Matt, and find me."_

He would break that promise. The one thing he wanted was the one thing he could not have. He would be immortalized in art the way he had once sought to immortalize others. He would be called a savior, a redeemer. In a thousand years, somebody would probably start a religion with him as God. But Miranda was lost to him.

"Is she?" The Catalyst's voice echoed around him. "I said you would be absorbed. I never said you would die. You have a chance to find her, and she has a chance to save you. Let us see if you take it."

Matt blacked out before he could ask what the hell that was supposed to mean.

_Two weeks later_

Mordin bustled around the Lawson Biomedical lab as if it belonged to him. Henry Lawson would have been horrified to find a salarian in charge of his lab, but Miranda was grateful. The salarians had taken heavy casualties in the Disaster, and he was one of the few people with the medical expertise to help them piece together what had happened in the aftermath and the ability to keep up with Miranda's punishing schedule.

"Have finished examining patient. Your hypothesis correct. Found nanites similar to those of indoctrinated subjects in bloodstream. Self-repair properties likely responsible for survival of suicide attempt."

Miranda tensed. The massive casualties sustained in the battle for London, the destruction of the relays, and the as-yet-unexplained flash of green light that had given everyone eyes that glowed had driven many to suicide. Those who had chosen violent means such as turning a gun on themselves had largely been successful, but those who had poisoned themselves had simply refused to die. Their bodies had repaired the damage faster than the toxins could cause it. "So, we're all indoctrinated, then?"

That would be a perfect capstone to this tragedy. Earth's population had been cut in half in just a few months. The Charon relay had been reduced to debris, stranding the allied forces in the Sol system. No one but the asari or krogan would ever see home again. Galactic civilization as they knew it was gone. Miranda would never see Oriana again. Matt and the rest of the Normandy crew were presumed lost. The Reapers had quit the field for unknown reasons, but it seemed they had won after all. Organics were destined to lose their minds.

But Mordin shook his head. "Unlikely. Nervous system altered, but changes not consistent with autopsies performed on Cerberus personnel. Endocrine system normal. Evidence of possibilities for increased strength and cognitive ability, but not indoctrination. Only preliminary guess with small sample size. Will need to run study once crisis has passed." He smiled, and it was the first real smile Miranda had seen in two weeks. "Fascinating mystery."

"Indeed." If intellectual curiosity kept Mordin upbeat, then he should indulge. The science team that had worked on the Crucible had suffered over eighty percent casualties. Brilliant minds like Mordin would be invaluable to Earth's recovery, if Earth even could recover. Miranda would be invaluable. At least that was what she told herself. It made an excellent excuse not to put a bullet in her skull. And at least now she knew not to try poison.

He peered at her. In salarians the green light was little more than pinpricks against a vast blackness. "Dark circles under eyes. Skin paler than normal. Signs of fatigue in humans. Recommend sleep, or at least cessation of work for day."

If I stop, I might have time to think. "I've got some reports from Brynn to go over first." She left before he could protest.

Henry had been a scientist first, a businessman second, and a father a distant third. He had wanted his office close to the labs, the better to monitor progress. Miranda had often found him haranguing the nominal project lead over some point of genetics while he was supposed to be dealing with stockholders. His assistant had had to drag him away from an attempt to increase telomerase production after Miranda had broken her arm. His office had reflected his priorities. Computers were everywhere, but the furniture was spare and built for function rather than luxury. A QEC dominated the center of the room. There had been no personal effects for Miranda to clear out when she had decided to make this the base of operation for her and the surviving former Cerberus personnel.

The one concession to his position had been the spectacular view. Perth, Sydney, and Brisbane had been devastated by the Reapers, but the resort town of Coffs Harbour had largely been left alone. The sea was the clear blue of her childhood, and white sand dotted the beaches. No smoke wafted up from a thousand fires, as it had in London. One could walk the streets here without the certainty of being mugged, raped, or murdered. That was one of Miranda's few accomplishments. The remnants of her strike team had become an impromptu police force, imposing a rough order on her childhood home. An order harshly enforced, but order nonetheless.

Brynn's message awaited her.

We've begun work on tissue samples from those who were in an intermediate husk state but not yet fully converted at the time the Reapers left the system. Prognosis for reversing the process is grim. Most are effectively dead the moment they come in contact with Dragon's Teeth. We could possibly do something with those who had been integrated, but there have been no reports of Cerberus troops in the area. Focusing on those indoctrinated, but not implanted, is our most productive course of action given our extremely limited resources. That makes the data you grabbed from Sanctuary much less useful, but with all the weird stuff going on, maybe that's a good thing.

Miranda buried her face in her hands. So much for that. She had been so sure—no, she had desperately wanted to believe—that the research she had gotten from Sanctuary would save lives. After all, without her, that would have been no Sanctuary. The astonishment in Henry's voice had been audible even in recordings. The pathetic daughter he had discarded had been useful after all. Miranda's research into a means to control Matt had provided the foundation for Sanctuary's work. There would have been no Paul Grayson, no integration process, if not for Lazarus and her desire for a control chip.

It always came back to the control chip. When she was twenty years old, she had trained an unusually powerful biotic and aspiring artist named Matthias Shepard to use his power so that Cerberus could test the L3 implant. Fifteen years later, she had brought him back from the dead. But the chip and Sanctuary tainted everything she had done, just as the madness of the last year had tainted Cerberus. Any good she or they had done had turned to ash. Henry took the blame, but she was responsible. She was the one who had been too blind to see the Illusive Man or Cerberus for what they were until it was too late. She hadn't even seen how much of her father there was in her: the brilliant genius infinitely more concerned with results than people. Matt had been her lover as well as her student all those years ago. That hadn't mattered. Cerberus had needed Commander Shepard to work with them, and Miranda would deliver that by fair means or foul. Falling in love with him again, and he with her, had been a grace neither expected nor deserved.

Neither of them had ever called it love. It would have been presumption, a jinx. But Miranda had seen it in drawings and paintings, had felt it in the way he squeezed her hand before they made the final jump through the Omega-4 relay. He had wanted her, but it was more than that. He had looked at her as if he believed she really could improve humanity. He would help her build a new world and chronicle it. He had loved her not for her looks or anything Henry had given her, but for her passion. As she had loved him for his, the way he believed the entire world could be explained in color and line.

The rest of the galaxy had fawned over the soldier who saved them all or cursed the man who had left the Council to die. But he had been Miranda's brilliant, darling boy first; and it was the boy—the man beneath the armor—that she had loved. Matt, who had drunkenly said her eyes were the color of space. Matt, who had held her quietly after Niket's death. Matt, who had taught her that supporting human advancement didn't mean supporting Cerberus. He had made her world richer, broader. With him at her side, she could have both a cause and a love.

And she had lost him. "Damn you, Matt, for promising. And damn me for believing."

"You aren't...the only one who…honors her promises." The voice was garbled as if coming from underwater, with a synthesized quality like those of Cerberus troopers or David Archer when he was plugged into the Overlord device.

Miranda's head snapped up, but there was no one there, and it was a very strange thing for an intruder to say. She ran her fingers through her hair. She'd stooped to hearing voices. Fatigue and grief had chipped away at her sanity bit by bit. Mordin was right. She needed a rest.

"Not a hallucination. I'll prove it." A green wall of light about the size of a grown man appeared in the QEC. The light shifted and changed, shrinking and altering form as if it were a block of marble being shaped by an invisible sculptor. Miranda watched in shock and fascination as it resolved itself into the rough form of a man. Then eyes, tinged with the unnatural green light but still undeniably blue, appeared. A crooked nose, a thin mouth. Last of all was dark auburn hair, this sort she had loved stroking when she had passed. It couldn't be. It wasn't. Even Lazarus couldn't make this miracle happen.

"Hello," Matt said. "Did it work? Can you hear me?"

Miranda stared at him open-mouthed. This couldn't be happening. She had lost everything, so her mind finally broken and given her back one thing. Matt was nothing more than a beautiful, agonizing fever dream.

"I'm real, Miranda." His voice cracked as he stared at his glowing hands as if he'd never seen them before. "I've come back. The Catalyst said that…I never believed…Oh, God."

"No," Miranda rasped, her throat raw with a burning pain. "You're just an illusion." An illusion she was talking to. Damn it.

"Shit, I should've known this would happen. And me without a body to prove I'm real." The specter's brow furrowed the same way Matt's did when he was planning a painting or deciding the most effective way to flank the enemy. I really, really hope this works. Could an illusion do this?"

The terminal Miranda had been reading winked off, and an alarm sounded somewhere in the distance. Matt smirked. "Hope no one tries to break in the next 10.32 seconds. Your security systems are going absolutely nuts."

"This is insane," Miranda managed. "I'm insane."

The comm link sprang to life before Matt could say anything. "Ms. Lawson. We have a situation. The security systems went off-line for a bit. We're not exactly sure what's going on."

Miranda stared at Matt and he at her. This couldn't be real. Fate had never been kind to her. Miranda always lost what she loved, and it never came back. And yet...hope was the cruelest of all masters. "For just a little over ten seconds."

"How did you know?"

Miranda's operative training kicked in by instinct, and her voice was cool and professional. "Never mind. The situation is under control." She shut the comm link off with shaking hands.

Matt was here. Somehow the dead had returned to life once more. The world had ended, but Fate had seen fit to give her this one moment of grace. The wall of numb grief sloughed off like a scab, exposing the rawness within. Grief and elation intertwined so tightly that Miranda could no longer tell which was which. Hot tears poured down her face, for what she had lost and what she had gotten back. Miranda had neither the strength nor the will to stop them.

Matt's voice was soft and warm. "Don't cry. Please. I've come back."

"How?" Miranda whispered. Perhaps it was foolish to question, but Miranda was a scientist. All things were explainable with time. Even miracles.

Matt told her. His voice was low and rhythmic, the way it was when he tried and failed for the thousandth time to explain to her what he saw in a Caravaggio or Degas. It was an incredible story. AIs that wore the form of a child. Synthetics becoming like organics. The Reapers being set free. All life changing on a molecular level. "I'm not really sure how I came back. I guess you could say that I put myself back together. Bits of data pieced together to make a person. No body, but I can control tech. I'm not sure what you would call me."

Miranda wiped her eyes. Matt was watching her with a mixture of worry and affection. He was a human hologram, if what he said was true. A digital ghost. Half of a miracle then, bringing back the mind but not the body. But then, there was no such thing as miracles, were there? There was only the effort of talented people who refused to take no for an answer. "I'll bring you back."

His smile was a brittle, frantically hopeful thing that looked as if it might break into pieces at any moment. "An ambitious undertaking, Ms. Lawson." His voice cracked. "Is that even possible?"

Miranda smiled despite herself. "A matter of time and resources. It's always a matter of time and resources." Wild, fierce joy that had no right to be there bubbled up inside her. "And I have something I didn't before."

"What's that?"

"Hope."

_Many years later_

"And that is the Shepard myth that inspired this painting. Scholars believe it is a late addition to the cycle, tying the figure of Matthias Shepard to the development of the ability to upload and store personalities. It is an example of an…"

John let Dr. Prescott drone on as the rest the class crowded around the painting. He'd always been fascinated by tales of the Shepard, ever since he'd been a little boy on Horizon drinking in every word his grandfather said. He was older now, old enough to know that the relays had only gone dark instead of exploding. Now his concerns were more human. He wondered what the real Miranda Lawson has done. He wondered if there had indeed been a Miranda, or if she was just another construct. But whatever she was had faded into myth long ago.

And yet, some part of him wanted her to have been real, wanted this to have been real. Death was nothing now; just upload your most recent personality backup into a new shell and go on your way. Fantastic, practically speaking. But it meant grand romantic gestures like spending years resurrecting your ex-boyfriend or reforming yourself because you had promised your girlfriend that you would find her were really hard to come by. John wanted to believe that they had once been possible.

"Lovely use of line," Nick said. He brushed his hair out of his eyes. "And you can almost see her fighting the hope, can't you? And the subtle green flecks in her eyes. Lots of painters, especially the neo-Luddites, will use a neon or sickly green to represent the first transformations. But it's deep and rich here. Like pine trees."

"I guess." John shrugged. Nick had always been a little weird. Obsessed with his painting and sketching. He was on his third degree though, and had been more than generous in sharing his notes and helping John pass art appreciation. "We still on for lunch later?"

"If you don't mind Claire joining us. She finished the nanotech improvements early, and I promised I'd meet her."

"You two enjoy yourselves." _And this way I don't have to explain the puddle of drool._ He looked back at the painting. "You ever think these stories are strange? I mean I know a lot of cultures appropriate myths, but the Shepard stuff seems to depend entirely on who's telling the story. The asari swear up and down that Miranda sold him out to this Cerberus, regretted it, and died in his arms. The krogan say that he cured the genophage; the salarians say that he only said he did and the cure was part of the Event."

It was the Nick's turn to shrug. "Tells you more about the culture of the tale-teller than anything. I'm betting most of these stories have exactly nothing to do with the real Shepard." He cleared his throat. "Assuming there was one. I could do without the asari version, though. All that dying. Saw an operatic version of it once. Last kisses, dying declarations of love. I thought Claire was going to vomit, it was so cheesy."

"Well, most versions of the story have one or both of dying. This is the only one I know of that has a happy ending. And even then, it's just the chance for one."

"Messianic archetype. He—" Whatever Nick was going to say was interrupted by the bell. John scrambled out of his seat and didn't think any more of the Shepard.

Until he saw Nick and Claire at lunch an hour later. They were outside of a small café, talking in low voices. Nick must've said something funny, because Claire threw back her head and laughed. John stopped. Everybody knew Claire Eldfell was gorgeous; she'd made the list of Sexiest CEOs fifteen years running for a reason. But this was different. She looked older, wiser than she did in the vids, like she was in on some great cosmic joke but not allowed to tell anyone for fear of spoiling it. She kissed Nick on the lips briefly, and he smiled at her. Speaking of cheesy…

And maybe that was why the myths stopped where they did. Even if the Shepard and his Miranda got a happy ending, it would have been full of mundane, stupid moments like this one. Anticlimax after defeating the Reapers. Better for the story if they both died as dramatically as possible. Throw in the possibility of a happy ending for the romantics, but let them die as dramatically as they lived. Who wanted to hear about the Savior of the Galaxy having lunch dates?

All the same, John hoped.


End file.
